Saturday, 26 August 2017

Moby Dick Hunt at Pleasure Island, Wakefield, Massachusetts

Time for a post about old and/or dead theme parks, I remain hopelessly fascinated by them so everyone
else must be too, that’s how it works right?

I’m mostly interested in
just one old ride at this park but I shall recap the whole story for you. The
park in question is Pleasure Island in Wakefield, Massachusetts U.S. which used
to be situated where the Edgeware Office Park now stands. At over 80 acres the
park was designed by C. V. Wood’s Marco Engineering company: a key figure in
acquiring the land for and designing Disneyland C. V. Wood had left and set up Marco
Engineering specifically to create knock-off Disneylands (they’d already built
the Magic Mountain park in Colorado by this point). The park came out of a concept for ‘Child Life World’
by Bill Hawkes, publisher of Child Life
magazine with the intent to educate at is entertained, never a good idea in my
mind: every time a park tries to educate it usually ends up being EPCOT: boring
then with drunks sleeping in it. Ground was broken in February 1959 and it took
four months and between four and four and a half million dollars to build.

The park opened on Monday
22nd June 1959 with Fess Parker and Rita Moreno there (amongst
others) to mark the occasion, four years after Disneyland (Fess Parker was
there as well, he missed his cue) and with the very bold tag-line ‘Disneyland of the Northeast’. It was very much a cheap but charming
Disneyland-lite with a mixture of standard tourist trap attractions, petting
zoo animals and some suspiciously similar attractions like: Space Rocket
(Mission to Mars), The Old Smokey Line (Disneyland Railroad), Jenney cars (The
Autopia), Pepsi-Cola’s Diamond Lil Show (Golden Horseshoe Revue) and Moby Dick
Hunt (Jungle River Cruise) – in fact it had pretty much everything Frontierland
had back then, not that those things were very original to begin with. The
first season bankrupted Hawke’s corporation: 75,000 guests were forecast but
around half that turned up so three investors from Boston bought the park and
ran it from 1960 to 1969, that grand re-opening had the Three Stooges. It did have monkeys on Monkey Island though
(Disney didn’t have monkeys!) and a fairly interesting sounding dark ride
called The Wreck of the Hesperus where riders travelled underwater and were
warned off by King Neptune himself as they left, it sounds pretty similar to
Submarine Voyage which was being developed at the time (it actually opened after
Pleasure Island) and given how many other elements of the park were inspired by
Disney I wouldn’t doubt that there’s a connection. Unless you come from
Wakefield or were a kid in the nearby area (or with family nearby) between 1959
and 1969 the park seems relatively uninteresting - except for the
aforementioned Hunt Moby Dick ride, which you may have noticed is the tile of
this post.

From what I can piece
together from various sites, pictures, videos, the great little book Pictures
of America: Pleasure Island and the awesome cine camera footage that these gifs
are mostly from, Moby Dick Hunt
was a boat ride around a man-mad lagoon that could only have been more based on
the Jungle River Cruise if It has been called Tropical Amazon Sailing. Riders
boarded six authentic 30 foot long whaling boats from the area of the park
called Clipper Cove which was based on a New England town, New England has a
history with whale fishing and this park was
supposed to be educational remember? Positioned around the edge of the lagoon
and on a man-made island were were models both animatronic and not, an
animatronic-ish rhino would charge at the boats, employees would then manually
steer the boats (no tracks) up the lagoon giving as spiel; up and around past
the cannibals and their village: models of the 1950s idea of ‘savage natives’
and then down towards the monster you were looking for, plastic dolphins
jumping through water as you went.

The Gregory Peck version of
Moby Dick had been released in 1956, three years before Pleasure Island opened
and around two before design work for it began – looking for something
contemporary to tie into, Marco Engineering found a perfect choice with the big
white whale: it was public domain, easily recognisable, fit with the education
and culture theme and it had been in a hit movie within very recent memory AND
it would be a very impressive showpiece. It was. What the 30-odd riders would
see after they came down from the cannibal camp was a 70ft long, 3 tonne
animatronic Moby Dick rising out of the water as if on cue:

That’s Moby Dick. Special
effects maestro Glen Robinson (Earthquake, Logan’s Run, the Dino De Laurentiis
remake of King Kong) built Moby Dick (and some of the effects for the Pleasure Island dark
rides) in Los Angeles. Moby was disassembled, shipped to Pleasure Island and
then assembled and installed in his spot. It ran on a giant piece of track on
the bottom of the lagoon and could be wheeled in and out of the water for
maintenance, which it apparently needed fairly often. Much like when filming
Jaws years later the animatronic worked fine – until it got into the water, it
was too buoyant at the start: they put it in the water and it floated right off
the tracks, Moby wouldn’t work again until July 5th, two weeks after
the park opened and would be a maintenance headache from then on, compounded by
the fact that unlike Disneyland’s waterways the lake Moby sat in couldn’t be
drained. Perhaps the most obvious issue but also the easiest to overlook was
that Moby Dick is a white whale, a
white whale in a dirty pond exposed to the elements, he took a lot of cleaning and gifs here alone
show that without constant love he could end up looking like someone took a
tommy gun to a cruise liner – if cruiser liners could bleed. This just makes me
wish I could have rode it even more - I fucking delight in riding old, run-down
rides that haven’t been refurbished since god knows when, it’s as close as you
can get to being I a derelict theme park that still works. I’ve gone into this
once I think but I’m fascinated by derelict building and especially derelict
tourist attractions - if I had the money I’d totally be into Urbex/Haikyo –
there’s an atmosphere, a sense of what once was, and a delightful mix of creepy
of wholesome that really does it for.
Chessington, World of Adventures used to have an old crocks ride called
Old Crocks Rally (now Toadies Crazy Cars) a ‘race’ past fibreglass models (it
has a barn with some animatronics it), my mum used to like it because it a ride
she could go on (she’s not good with rides) I used to like it because it was
virtually ignored by maintenance. The figures were unloved, the pond was black,
there was leaves all over the dioramas, noses and fingers chipped off, plants
growing around where they shouldn’t be, it was even shoved to the side in an
unloved part of the park that had some old water features that were full of
algae and plants, it was like being in a derelict theme park. So I actually
prefer Moby looking like something out of Ghost Ship.

The effort was worth if it
if you ask me, Moby Dick Hunt became the park’s signature attraction and the
whale himself was the mascot for the park before it even opened, appearing on
the sign to direct visitors to the park, merchandise and elsewhere. So it was
worth it from a marketing point view but more so Disney didn’t have anything
like Moby Dick and still hasn’t achieved it since, though they’ve had tunnels
built to replicate their whale they’ve never produced a full animatronic version
of Monstro but C.V. Wood - the forgotten Imagineer, the one Disney don’t like
to talk about – achieved this feat in 1959. And what a feat, imagine riding a
fairly cheap and mostly uninspiring boat ride, the rhino bit was nice but it’s
nowhere near as exciting as it’s billed to be - then a 20 foot moving whale
rises out of the water and its blowhole goes off. Now imagine you’re six and
its 1961, now you can probably see why I’ve become such a fan of this one
long-dead ride. For me Theme park rides (that aren’t ‘coasters obviously) are
at their best they allow the rider to experience something they otherwise
couldn’t usually be in there and be a part of (so things that you’d only see in
films, TV or dreams) and even better when they create a dream-like atmosphere,
a dream you can experience while awake, remember clearly and take pictures (or
cine camera footage) of. A life-size moving 3D Moby Dick fulfils the first part
perfectly and a life-size moving 3D Moby Dick rising out of a jungle themed
ride in what is otherwise a fairly obviously American landscape is dreamlike
alright, or nightmare-like, apparently a fair few passengers needed new pants
after the trip and they weren’t all children.

Although maintenance issues
meant the he didn’t operate continually Moby Dick Hunt was operating from 2
weeks after the park’s grand opening through all 11 seasons until Pleasure
Island shut down in 1969. A particularly cold summer caused a dip in attendance
and forced the park to switch to only being open at weekends which ultimately
proved unfeasible too and the park shut. On April 1st 1971 two fires broke out
and burnt down two buildings including the Greenwood railroad depot, an old
Greeenwood local landmark that that had been transported to the park. The park
stood derelict for a long time after it closed, it was still there in ruins in
the mid-1970s and some of the park was looted by locals - apparently someone
panelled their basement with wood from the crooked house they had there (The
Slanty Shanty). The charging rhino was definitely removed and it seems like the
dolphins were not but what became of Moby is a little sketchy. Some eye witness
accounts of visiting the derelict park in the 1970s put Moby as having been
left on land near where he used to swim but by 1996 eye witness accounts place
Moby as having been left under the water and talk like this is just an accepted
fact that everyone who worked at the industrial estate knew, apparently you
could see him from the roof of 590 Edgewater or from the window of the maintenance
department of the Edgeware Office Park – there’s even a funny story from
employees about a diver stumbling upon the whale. However it seems by 2001 Moby
was gone. Some of his tracks (the ones used to get him in and out of the water)
were seen when water levels became very low at the industrial park in 2010,
which also revealed a burnt out boat from the Captain Kidd’s Cove area of the
theme park and the tracks for the charging rhino but Moby was nowhere to be
seen – however Moby’s starting position put around 8ft of water between the
whale and the surface so I guess it could
still be down there, the water’d have to lower roughly the height of
Slender Man to see it after all but it seems unlikely, Moby is most likely
dead.

To end on a happier note:
Mold-a-Rama. Mold-A-Rama are those make your own souvenir machines that used to
litter theme parks, there’s still some in Busch Gardens. Well one mould set you
can put in your Mold-a-Rama machine for people to make is their Pilot Whale set - which was
made in 1963 for Pleasure Island where it would originally cast plastic whales
in white! This mold has been in use all over the shop in various parks but
always retains the ‘Pleasure Island’ name on its base and if you ever wondered
why your whale from Aquariumland or whatever had the wrong name on it, now you
know. i need to find one of these, it doesn’t need to be white, it can be from
any location of any age but I need a Pleasure Island Moby Dick figurine.

And there you are, I’ve now
told you a lot about an old ride you will never ride in an old park you will
never go to, why did I do that and why today? Meh, just felt like it. Thanks
for reading about big animatronics and check out The Friends of Pleasure Island if I haven’t drained all interest and
enthusiasm for the old park out of you, it’s a pretty comprehensive fan site.